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| Category: Spirituality And Psychology:Afterlife |
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| About the Book | |
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Science tells us one story and religion another. Neither is complete. Together they offer profound new questions. In union, they give us a depth of understanding that leads to a new level of comfort and assurance. We live in a universe that will never reveal all of its secrets. We do not have the capacity to understand them, let alone even identify all the variables. We have suspected this since we became conscious and created great religious allegories to point to what we know is here and beyond our rational minds to comprehend. Now science is beginning to explain some of those mysteries and expose us to levels of reality we couldn’t have dreamed of a mere century ago. As we reveal them we stand in awe at what we find. Our scientific models cannot be reconciled. Our religious metaphors fade by comparison to what we are beginning to see. It is beyond the scope of this book to make assertions about this enigmatic universe. But the scientists quoted throughout agree on one basic principle; this is a mysterious place that defies our ability to provide a comprehensively coherent explanation of its existence. But there is good news here and it comes from reconnecting to our ancient wisdom. In her book, The Battle for God, former nun Karen Armstrong draws an important distinction between mythos and logos. In times past, people evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which she referred to as mythos and logos. They were complementary ways of finding the truth so both were needed. Mythos looked to allegories that revealed truths only appreciated at the deepest levels of the human mind. Today, we call this subjective experience. Logos was the rational, the pragmatic, the factual, the so-called objective. Today we call this the scientific method. Mythos doesn’t come from the rational mind. Nor does the rational mind come from mythos. But together they make up the whole of human experience. Now, we’ve arrived at a time when the mythos, the subjective, has been devalued in favor of the logos; the objective, scientific explanation of reality. There’s a clue to our dilemma in Armstrong’s words, “In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse.” If we’re going to understand our scientific discoveries at the most fundamental level of reality, we need both methods. Mythos provides the context for the rational explanations of science. Without mythological context, our scientific explanations are empty. Without scientific explanations, our mythologies drift into the idolatry of ideologies. When we ignore one or the other, science and religion remain incomplete as does our understanding.
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| About the Author | |
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As an organizational consultant, De Filippis brought the applied behavior sciences to businesses. He has authored six books and continues to contribute Op/Ed pieces to the website Opednews.com. His writing focus is the exploration of what it means to be a human being and the possibilities that abound. |